Hi Reddit! I am Denis Wirtz of Johns Hopkins University, where I wear two hats: Vice Provost for Research and T.H. Smoot Professor in the schools of engineering and medicine. I also direct the Johns Hopkins Physical Sciences-Oncology Center and co-direct the Cancer Nanotechnology Training Center, both funded by the National Cancer Institute, and serve as associate director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology. As a faculty member, my lab conducts research in cancer: specifically, we are trying to determine the physical and biological underpinnings of metastatic disease, by far the primary cause of death in cancer patients. For example, my group was the first to establish how a 3-dimensional environment (think a 3D matrix) fundamentally affects the way cancer cells migrate, providing us with much more biologically and medically-relevant information than 2D studies (think Petri dishes) routinely used in the lab. Subsequent studies of the tumor microenvironment in simplified systems have increased our understanding of how cancer cells (we focus on pancreatic, breast, and ovarian cancer) migrate, morph, and are modulated by mechanical forces during metastasis. Our research has led me to re-evaluate what makes cancer lethal, often drug-resistant, and prone to recurrence after tumor removal. In the future, I am proposing a paradigm shift on how to diagnose tumors and develop new drugs, complementing the more mainstream genetic approaches. This is pertinent to US investments (biotech, big pharma, and federal agencies) in cancer treatments. In my other role as VP for Research, I work with my divisional colleagues to oversee all research at Johns Hopkins University, the largest recipient of federal funding in the US. In that capacity, I direct the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships, the President’s Frontier Award, research development, interdivisional research awards programs, improvements in research infrastructure, compliance and policies, etc. I have been particularly eager to help junior faculty (due to the current funding environment) and to promote collaborative, multidisciplinary research. I’m excited to speak with you about all things cancer and research! I will begin answering questions at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 6 pm UTC). Ask me anything! Links: My lab: http://wirtzlab.johnshopkins.edu/ VPR Profile: http://web.jhu.edu/administration/provost/bios/wirtz Faculty Profile: http://engineering.jhu.edu/chembe/faculty/denis-wirtz/ Publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=UJP_JHEAAAAJ&hl=en EDIT: I am signing off now. Thank you everyone for all your great questions. I look forward to doing this again.

Hi Reddit, we’re a team of plasma physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics that has 2 branches in Garching (near Munich) and Greifswald (in northern Germany). We’ve recently launched our fusion experiment Wendelstein 7-X in Greifswald after several years of construction and are excited about its ongoing first operation phase. In the first week of February, we created our first hydrogen plasma and had Angela Merkel press our big red button. We’ve noticed a lot of interest on reddit about fusion in general and our experiment following the news, so here we are to discuss anything and everything plasma and fusion related! Here’s a nice article with a cool video that gives an overview of our experiment. And here is the ceremonial first hydrogen plasma that also includes a layman’s presentation to fusion and our experiment as well as a view from the control room. Answering your questions today will be: Prof Thomas Sunn Pedersen - head of stellarator edge and divertor physics (ts, will drop by a bit later) Michael Drevlak - scientist in the stellarator theory department (md) Ralf Kleiber - scientist in the stellarator theory department (rk) Joaquim Loizu - postdoc in stallarator theory (jl) Gabe Plunk - postdoc in stallarator theory (gp) Josefine Proll - postdoc in stellarator theory (jp) (so many stellarator theorists!) Adrian von Stechow - postdoc in laboratory astrophyics (avs) Felix Warmer (fw) We will be going live at 13:00 UTC (8 am EST, 5 am PST) and will stay online for a few hours, we’ve got pizza in the experiment control room and are ready for your questions. EDIT 12:29 UTC: We’re slowly amassing snacks and scientists in the control room, stay tuned! http://i.imgur.com/2eP7sfL.jpg EDIT 13:00 UTC: alright, we’ll start answering questions now! EDIT 14:00 UTC: Wendelstein cookies! http://i.imgur.com/2WupcuX.jpg EDIT 15:45 UTC: Alright, we’re starting to thin out over here, time to pack up! Thanks for all the questions, it’s been a lot of work but also good fun!

I (Michael Hansen) am a biomedical engineer at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). I focus on fast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques for real-time imaging and interventional procedures, particularly fast pulse sequences, non-Cartesian imaging, real-time reconstruction, GPU based reconstruction, and motion correction. Andrew Arai - I am a cardiologist and I am the Director of the Advanced Cardiovascular Imaging Laboratory for the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. My primary clinical and research interests center around coronary artery disease, the condition that leads to heart attacks and is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. For the 21 years I have been at the NIH, I have been helping develop and validate MRI methods useful to diagnosing and evaluating patients with coronary artery disease. We run a busy clinical program and perform over 1000 cardiac MRI scans per year. Roman Salasznyk - I am a Principal in Booz Allen’s Strategic Innovation Group with over 13 years of experience in biomedical research, medical product development, and general management consulting. I manage a multidisciplinary team that supports initiatives aimed to expedite medical product innovation and approvals, enhance regulatory decision-making processes, and strengthen surveillance and compliance operations for Federal health clients. The three of us, and our respective organizations, have collaborated on an exciting crowd-sourced collaboration, the the Data Science Bowl on kaggle. By putting data science to work in the cardiology field, we can empower doctors to help people live longer and spend more time with those that they love. Dr. Salasznyk: On behalf of the Data Science team at Booz Allen, thank you for your interest in the Data Science Bowl and this year’s heart health-focused challenge. To learn more about this year’s competition or to submit your ideas on next year’s Data Science Bowl challenge—-a problem with the potential to change the world–visit our web site: datasciencebowl.com Dr Hansen here: Thank you for the great questions. They really covered a wide range of cardiology, technology, and engineering. I hope questions and answers will inspire data scientists, engineers, and physicians to get involved in cardiac MRI research. There are many unsolved problems with potential impact in patient lives. Dr. Arai here – Thank you all for your interesting questions. It was hard to predict how many people would submit questions and comments. It was nice to see the breadth of both technical and clinical questions. It is hard to pick a favorite but hearing about long term survivors with cancer and congenital heart disease are heartening. Many of the technical questions about speed and comfort of MRI relate to research being performed at NIH and many other institutions around the world. Faster imaging that does not rely on breath holds is a major direction for the future. Better quality imaging hopefully will continue to improve patient outcomes. Edit: Adding link to the Data Science Bowl site and competition page.

A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.

Hi Reddit! Our research team—collectively working as part of the Antarctic Peninsula Paleontology Project, or AP3—is on a National Science Foundation-supported research vessel on its way to Antarctica. This will be our third expedition to explore the Antarctic Peninsula for fossils spanning the end of the Age of Dinosaurs (the Late Cretaceous) to the dawn of the Age of Mammals (the early Paleogene). During that time, roughly 90–60 million years ago, Antarctica was relatively warm and lush, as well as home to a great diversity of plants and animals—including dinosaurs! Antarctica may have also been the place of origin for several key animal groups seen in today’s ecosystems—such as modern birds and certain kinds of mammals. On our past expeditions we’ve made important discoveries, including fossils of non-avian dinosaurs, fish, marine reptiles, and birds. During our 2011 field season, we discovered additional fossils of Vegavis iaai, an extinct bird that is related to ducks and geese. Vegavis is the only undoubted example of what is considered to be a modern bird that co-existed with non-avian dinosaurs. We also discovered a previously unrecognized set of rocks that were laid down during the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary interval, one of the very few such sets of rocks to be recognized on the entire Antarctic continent. This recently-identified rock section could yield new insights into the effects of the (in)famous K–Pg mass extinction that killed off all non-avian dinosaurs. These paleontological and geological discoveries have provided many clues as to what Antarctica was like tens of millions of years ago, but countless mysteries remain. That’s why we’re off to Antarctica to explore for new fossils and to gather data that will help us better understand how the environment has changed through time. We are: Matt Lamanna, the AP3 director, a paleontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, who specializes in the study of dinosaurs from the Southern Hemisphere. Julia Clarke, a professor of paleontology and evolutionary biology at The University of Texas at Austin who named and described the Antarctic fossil bird species Vegavis iaai in 2005. Julia studies the evolution of dinosaurs, birds, and flight to better understand major transitions in the history of life. Pat O’Connor, a professor of anatomical sciences at Ohio University whose research interests include the evolution of crocodiles, dinosaurs, and birds during the Cretaceous Period. Ross MacPhee, a curator of mammalogy and professor at the American Museum of Natural History who studies paleobiogeography, extinction, and cranial development in mammals. Eric Gorscak, a doctoral candidate in Pat O’Connor’s lab at Ohio University who studies the evolutionary history of titanosaurian sauropod dinosaurs during the Cretaceous. Abby West, a PhD student at Columbia/American Museum of Natural History studying fossil mammals. Chris Torres, a PhD student of Julia Clarke’s, studying fossil birds. Kerin Claeson, a paleontologist at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine studying fossil fishes. Meng Jin, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History studying fossil mammals. Steve Salisbury, a paleontologist at The University of Queensland studying fossil crocodilians and non-avian dinosaurs. Eric Roberts, a geologist at James Cook University. Zubair Jinnah, a geologist at the University of the Witwatersrand. Check out our expedition website: antarcticdinos.org Follow us on Twitter at: @AntarcticDinos #ExpeditionAP3 We’ll be back at 12 pm et (9 am PT, 5 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!

A document by PLOSScienceWednesday . Click on the document to view its contents.

Hi everyone! We are lecturers in quantitative social science at the Sheffield Methods Institute. Increasingly, the media bombards us with all sorts of data about how society is changing: opinion poll trends; migration data; economic results; government debt levels; and politicians’ expenses claims. We look at where those numbers come from, can they be trusted and how they can be manipulated visually and in written form to support a contentious claim. Todd Hartman: I’m a political psychologist by training, and I’ve got extensive experience conducting surveys and experiments. My current research focuses on political attitudes and intergroup relations. Before I came to Sheffield, I was Director of Survey Research for the Centre for Economic Research and Policy Analysis as well as Assistant Professor of Political Science at Appalachian State University. I’ve been in Sheffield for about a year and a half, and in that time I’ve got heavily into rugby and real ale. Aneta Piekut: I was trained as a sociologist, but have been working in a different subdisciplines of social science, mixing various research methods. In my research I am interested in such topics as social diversity, social inclusion, integration of ethnic minority groups and socio-spatial segregation, working with surveys and secondary data. I spend my spare time in a gym or swimming, and walking Czarek, a rescue dog, whose adventures you can follow on Instagram. Mark Taylor: I’m a sociologist who’s interested in culture, broadly defined - so music, video games, TV, books, and so on. I mainly work with survey data, but also work with data from schools, the labour market, and other more-or-less official sources. For graphics I’m a total evangelist for ggplot2, and I’m in the process of getting my head round Tableau as well. I also spend an inordinate amount of my time playing the Binding of Isaac. We also developed this course to help people brush up their social statistics skills and help combat the rising trend of misleading data visualizations. Here’s proof that it’s us! We’ll be back at 11am ET/4pm GMT to answer your questions. Ask us anything! EDIT: We’re ready to go, and we’ve been joined by our colleague Andrew Bell who’s also a lecturer in quantitative social science! EDIT: We’re signing off for now. Thanks everyone for some great questions and insightful discussion! We’ll keep an eye on the AMA if you think there’s any big questions we’ve missed and try to get round to them! Also if you want to freshen up your social statistics skills then check out our course on data in the media.

Hi, Reddit! I argue that current efforts to reduce brain injuries in youth tackle football—whether through adult supervision, training, or new helmet designs—are largely not supported by scientific evidence, and are therefore insufficient to protect players. Instead, to significantly reduce the risk of concussive trauma, football organizations should consider changes to the way youth football is played—specifically, eliminating tackling, in favor of touch and flag versions of the game. Read my article that I co-authored with Daniel Goldberg of East Carolina University in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (http://aslme.org/pdfs/aslme_jlme-42-3_bachnyski_goldberg.pdf). I will post a link to a second journal article as soon as it is published on Feb. 4. I’ll be back at 1 pm et (10 am PT, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything! EDIT: Here is a link to a Perspective article I wrote in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1513993 EDIT: Hi Reddit! I’m arriving and I’ll start answering in a few minutes. Thank you for all the great questions! EDIT: Thank you so much for all your fantastic questions. It was really a privilege to have so many people engage with this topic and share their thoughts. I have to leave now to get back to my dissertation (which I’m supposed to defend in April!). Thank you again.

A document by AmerChemSocietyAMA . Click on the document to view its contents.

Hi, Reddit – We’re a team of epidemiologists from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In our recent study titled, “Unequal depression for equal work? How the wage gap explains gendered disparities in mood disorders,” we used propensity scores to match women and men on age, education, occupation, family composition, years in the workforce, and other factors, and then estimated the effect of income differentials on depression and generalized anxiety disorder. We found that U.S. women whose income was lower than their male matches had nearly 2.5 times the odds of major depression and 4 times the odds of generalized anxiety disorder. Yet when women’s income was greater than their male matches, women’s odds of generalized anxiety disorder or depression were nearly equivalent to men. This finding, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953615302616), may help explain why women are nearly twice as likely to have depression or anxiety than men. We are… Lisa Bates, an assistant professor of Epidemiology and social epidemiologist engaged in research on gender and other axes of inequality as they impact health outcomes; Katherine M. Keyes, an assistant professor of Epidemiology whose research focuses on life-course epidemiology with particular attention to psychiatric disorders; Jonathan Platt, a second-year doctoral student in Epidemiology who studies the incidence and social causes of gender disparities of mood disorders; and Seth Prins, a PhD candidate in Epidemiology who studies the political-economic determinants of mental illness, in addition to mental illness and mass incarceration. We’ll be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, Ask Us Anything! *Edit: Hello! We’re online and ready to start answering your questions. We’ll be here for about an hour and a half. We’re going to answer as many questions as we can, and try to cover a range of issues, from our findings to our methods and theory. * ***Edit: We’re going to wrap up now – thanks so much for your great questions!***

Hi Reddit, I’m a writer at Quartz. My beat is the intersection of geopolitics, energy, science and technology. Today, oil prices are around $33 a barrel, and most analysts think the highest they’ll go this year is another $10–up to $43, which is much lower than it was when I started looking seriously at advanced batteries. That was around six years ago. Batteries caught my eye because I kept seeing the presidents and prime ministers of countries assert that they–their nation–was going to dominate what they predicted were big battery or electric car industries. That was the US (Obama), China (Hu), Japan and about a dozen more, and the numbers they tossed around for how much these industries would be worth were enormous. They were the size of Google’s annual revenue at the time. The kind of wealth that could move geopolitics. I persuaded one of the federal US labs–Argonne, near Chicago–to let me sit with its battery team for a year while they worked on creating the big breakthrough that would bring on this age. Argonne’s credential is that its battery material–NMC–is in the Chevy Volt. It stretched to two years. By the end–and through today–Argonne did not create the big breakthrough (nor did anyone else). The electrics and hybrids that have been introduced have not gone viral. And, as we started with, oil prices are about 75% lower than they were when it was thought that economy–saving gasoline–would be a big impetus for the electric car age. So was the battery and electric car talk back then a bunch of hype? In some cases, definitely, and we can get into that. I’ve done some work on a couple of the hypesters. But my own theory–and it’s based on what I’m watching–is that we are entering a natural, second stage of the mainstreaming of electric cars. Batteries are one thing–the researchers I talk to don’t have a lot of confidence that they are close to a big leap. Nor do they see anything on the horizon that creates the big electrochemical advance. They are still at the bench, working away. But–and we can get into this–the manufacturers are going ahead anyway. The pure electric Chevy Bolt, introduced a couple of weeks ago at CES in Las Vegas, was an example of this. It will go 200 miles on a charge and cost $30,000 after the federal subsidy. That is mainstream distance and price. It’s based on advances on the factory floor–engineering with the cars, and tinkering with the batteries. So I see the possibility that the last half of the decade proves to be a tipping point for electrics. A wild card is Apple. It’s stealthily building its pure electric Titan, aiming for launch in 2019 or so. If it does launch, that will mean serious resonance for mainstream electrics. I will be back at 1 pm EST (10 am PST, 6 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask me anything! Endnote: It’s after 3 pm now. I am going to sign off for a couple of hours. I’ll return this evening and answer more questions if they are there. Meanwhile, thanks so much for signing on. I really enjoyed the experience. Best Steve

Hi Reddit, Our names are Ruã Daros, João Costa, Marina von Keyserlingk, Maria Hötzel, Heather Neave and Daniel Weary. We are researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada and the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Brazil. Our research focuses on animal welfare, how to use changes in behaviour to make inferences about the quality of life that animal’s experience. We recently published a study entitled “Separation from the Dam Causes Negative Judgement Bias in Dairy Calves” in PLOS ONE. Young farm animals, including dairy calves, are often separated from the dam far earlier than what occurs under natural conditions. Farms animals are also sometimes subjected to painful procedures like hot-iron dehorning. The aim of this study was to better understand the effects of these routine procedures on the emotions of animals. One way to investigate mood states is to look for evidence of judgement biases. We tested for cognitive biases in calves before and after separation from the cow and dehorning, and found diminished responding to intermediate, ambiguous stimuli (evidence of a pessimistic response) following both physical pain and social loss. This paper illustrates one approach to investigating emotional states in animals, and draws parallels in the emotional experience of physical and social pain. We will be online at 1pm EST (10am PST), and we look forward to hearing your questions about our work! Please also follow us in Twitter @ubcAWP.